More and more businesses move to an e-business strategy to integrate their application servers with existing heterogeneous EISs' (Enterprise Information System). Recent advancements have provided unified architectures for components in an application server to access resources in an EIS. The J2EE (Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition) Connector Architecture (JCA) is one such example. Usually, a software driver, such as SAP JRA (Java Resource Adaptor) can be plugged into the unified architecture to support the underlying EIS services, such as SAP ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) functions. Various services such as databases, enterprise business applications and messaging, etc. can be made available through a unified architecture based on different software drivers.
Typically, an application server uses access objects with a unified architecture to call remote functions in an EIS plugged in the unified architecture attached to the application server. Often times, software codes are executed in the application server to implement the access objects. Additionally, special objects may be required to map remote function parameters between the application server and the EIS.
However, the design and coding tasks may become burdensome when complicated data structures are involved to access EIS services from an application server through a unified architecture. Nested table structures from a remote function call are such examples. Coding in such a case is error prone and time consuming.